


The trick is to keep feeling

by HoneyB7



Category: Eurovision Song Contest RPF, Melekseev
Genre: Angst, Drama, M/M, Romance, Very very very insinuated intimate content, fluff?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 15:25:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14751455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HoneyB7/pseuds/HoneyB7
Summary: After months of frequenting each other in secret, Mélovin and Alekseev need to make a decision: this fragile “relationship” can go on? That’s Mélovin wish, but Alekseev, since Eurovision, drags a deep concern that eclipses everything else, even his feelings towards the one who doesn’t want to give up on him.





	The trick is to keep feeling

**Author's Note:**

> Please, forgive me, but my English isn’t good at all. Despite that, I put all my best in this.
> 
> I wrote this for fun, love and English practice. If you read despite the mistakes and the silly details that I chose for the plot, thank you so much! ♥

**S** ilence, in touch with a vehement love, can be the most appropriate companion in certain situations. That is what he discovers in the silence that surrounds them: to have the pleasure of contemplating him this way, without needing to say anything, without any useful sense other than the sight, is the sweetest pause that he can receive in this complex moment of his life. Looking at him without pressure, without words, without past or repetition in a possible discourse, is like travel into another kind of reality. One that is beautiful, tender.

Perfect for both.

"I don’t know what the juries were thinking, I insist," Nikita says suddenly.

His eyes are focused on the glimpses of the Odessa's sunset, absorbed by the need, perhaps, to reconnect with everything that was his life before the great step that both of them gave last months, participate in Eurovision and reach an unprecedented diffusion in Europe and beyond. That is the impression that his gesture transmits, at least.

Mélovin looks at him from the desk chair thinking about the contest and also about the enjoyment of the mere contemplation that was his world just a moment ago, when only silence was the main character.

"You should have qualified to the final," Mélovin says, as absorbed in Nikita's harmonic face as he is in the sky.

Nikita looks down. Mélovin knows that this gesture is what comes out from him when modesty reaches his heart.

"I was talking about you," Nikita says then, smiling. “In my case, even with the juries’ blessing I wouldn’t have reached the final.”

Mélovin feels how the frustration invades Nikita. He is not agreeing with all that comes from him about this subject in particular.

“You were three points lower than Eugent in the tele-vote or something like that; I saw it in the Wikipedia! I had to open it in English, it’s difficult to me, but the numbers are still the same and I'm sure that..." He clenches his fists when shuts up; Nikita seems not to hear him. Absorbed by the sunset, he continues as before, rediscovering the Ukrainian sky.

Or he looks at the sky in that way for another reason?

“They supported me more than I would have expected, I'm happy with that. The Azerbaijani support was very beautiful to me.”

Mélovin calms down while seeing him smile with his eyes on the floor, repeating the gesture of modesty; outside, the night has timidly begun.

Nikita is transparent, but at the same time he is not. He seems to reveal everything with the purity that radiates every second of his existence, but some of his feelings are complex to read in the deepest nuances of his being. They are still getting to know each other, after all. There is still too much ahead for them.

At last, that's what Mélovin wants to believe.

“That's what I’m telling you!” Mélovin exclaims, convinced. “If the juries had been fair, you would have qualified. But listen! At least you had more points from them in the semifinal than I did in the final, I allow you to make fun of me. I mean... Eleven points! Eleven! At least you did like nine more and you were not the last. Guess who can’t say the same! But, well, I keep thinking in the people’s votes. For them I sing, not for the juries!”

Nikita laughs when he closes his eyes tightly. Mélovin holds the base of the chair in which he is sitting with restless fingers and exacerbated energy: Nikita is so beautiful that he does not tolerate looking at him. Because staring at Nikita Alekseev in excess means losing all control and all sanity.

 _The type of beauty I call supreme_ , he forced himself to hum mentally in order to calm down. When a crooked smile escapes from him, he crosses his hands between his knees as he moves one leg energetically, seeking to relax. He sighs, and Nikita leaves the evening’s sky when he turns towards him.

A single lamp is lit in the hotel room that Mélovin has reserved especially for the occasion, seen Nikita after several days of intense work and separation, Nikita busy with the promotion of his new song and he making new songs for a future album. Going out into the streets of Ukraine a month after Eurovision is still not easy for either of them and the distances are more complicated than desired despite of being in the same country, but the madness has waned: the first days, the world was chaos and screams; the last ones showed an abrupt change of pace.

It is June and the cold is hardly felt; Eurovision finally lies in the past helped by the poor results obtained by both at the eyes of a country with some too demanding media and fans. But how inevitable is, for Mélovin, to feel himself again in Lisbon when he contemplates Nikita illuminated more by the lamp lit than by the faint light from the moon painted on the sky. Looking at him means to remember too much and, at the same time, a little bit of everything that had happened between them in so untidy way. It is to be back in Lisbon with him after his elimination in the first semifinal, embracing him intensely, wiping each tear with his lips and each shout with a kiss; praying to the music and its power for Nikita’s happiness, the same that he was trying to express to him.

It is time to leave the subject behind. People have left it behind, the media has left it behind, but Nikita seems unable to do it.

Why?

The meeting should not last much longer, that’s what the night sky whisper in Mélovin’s ears. Nikita, in front of him, smiles with frankness, while Mélovin, stunned by how the beauty of the one he is contemplating seems to increase second to second, keeps moving one leg because of the nervousness that can’t be reduced with nothing.

"Your score is sad considering what you did," Nikita says with an unbroken smile on his lips. “I think we both took a risk and that's why the juries didn’t vote for us.”

Suddenly, Mélovin sees how the smile leaves Nikita. He feels the floor tremble under his feet as he notes how his gesture changes to a kind of anguish. Oh, how impossible to hold it! Tolerate something like that in Nikita's face hurts.

That mouth without a smile is a calamity considered its indisputable beauty.

"I know," Mélovin says at last, serious. The leg moves faster than before and the fingers collide with each other disorderly. “But I still think that taking risks is a good thing.”

“Give too much of you and feel that someone doesn’t value it enough is not always easy,“ replies Nikita “not when you gave your whole soul...”

The leg stops.

What is Nikita talking about?

Mélovin stands up, walks towards him, stops his feet half a meter away. He watches Nikita thanks to the weak lamp; outside, the night is darker than before.

Nothing lasts forever, discovers Mélovin when he notice the stars twinkling like lamps in the sky. Although we wish with all our strength to stop the inevitable, even the most perfect sunset comes to an end. The night arrives, clock does not stop. Time is unstoppable and everything comes to an end.

Even this man’s peace is extinguished in the face of despair.

Nikita fakes a smile. Mélovin does not believe him.

"Rejection is hard when you gave too much of yourself," Mélovin says thinking in his failed attempt against O. Torvald the previous year. A laugh comes from his mouth when he notices a detail. “Last year I lost in Vibdir because of the juries! They never support me!” He smiles so much that he notices how Nikita looks at him with some curiosity shining in his eyes. “The disappointment of 2017 made me stronger. I think is important give always your soul, no matter what they think or believe.  I’m trying to say that you…”

Mélovin can’t say another word: Nikita looks at him with a fixity that even achieves bristle his skin with so little and so much. He tries to say something, he open his mouth, but nothing comes out from him, nothing flows. Nikita’s gaze is poisoned with anguish and makes Mélovin's hands and soul trembling at the same pace, at the same speed.

"I worked very hard for this, Kostyantyn," Nikita whispers, staring at him with the same fixity than before. Mélovin, dizzy for how seductive his real name sounds in the voice he likes the most, holds one of his hands with the other. Both are shaking. “I'm happy with what we did with my team, I think it was different, personal and emotional, but I feel a little disappointed because my song hasn’t moved anyone enough.”

Mélovin speaks without thinking. The answer is too obvious:

“You moved me.”

Nikita smiles sincerely,

“You moved me too. You were the best..." Nikita turns to the window again. He sighs while observing the stars that are already in splendor in the night sky. “But if you are a singer, an artist, I mean, and you can’t make that the listener feels moved by your emotions...”

The trembles stops in Mélovin’s body. He opens his eyes as much as possible: he has understood not only what Nikita is talking about; he has understood that Nikita has chosen him and no other for this confession.

This deep insecurity is, now, a secret that belongs only to them. 

"Don’t question your quality or not as an artist, Nikita," Mélovin says, touching him on the shoulder to make Nikita to look at him one more time, with the same fixity, with the same almost unbearable anguish printed in his eyes. “Sometimes we don’t reach as many people as we want. You know: this isn’t about being successful or selling; it’s about feeling that we reach someone through our music. For something we release our songs, otherwise we would leave them, I don’t know, to sing in the shower!” Mélovin laughs; he feels how the enthusiasm that he wants to spread to his words is burning in his chest. “I’m completely sure that, although the votes weren’t the ones you deserved, you reached the hearts of countless people. Have you not read the comments on YouTube? Have you not read the comments on Instagram? You moved a lot of people, Nikita. A lot! You just had the bad luck to have the winner - nothing more and nothing less - before you in the worst bloodbath in Eurovision’s history!

He knows it because of the messages he has read almost obsessively after the semifinal in which Nikita had failed to qualify. While some told "he can’t sing" or “he’s bad”, absurd comments because it was obvious that they had not heard the interpretation properly, there were so many other messages, so many people excited with the trembles and emotion present in the particular but wonderful voice of Alekseev, the Belarus’s contestant who had dared to undress his soul live and in front of millions as nobody else had dared to do it in 2018. To play it safe was the easy thing in the contest; Nikita had done the opposite and that was admirable.

"And besides," adds Mélovin, touched for his own words, "you moved me, yes. Like few others did but no one at your point when I saw you on stage, you moved me!”

He expects a smile from Nikita thanks to the compliment and the enthusiasm, but no: the anguish is still in his eyes, both twisted as if the tears were coming. Nikita moves his pupils to one side, to the other, to the top, to the bottom, and in the end he gives a long sigh just before to looking at him, at Mélovin, at the eyes.

Mélovin feels that his heart falls out of his chest, literally.

“But it's a little exhausting.”

“What, Nikita?”

“Give everything of you only to feel, then, how the emptiness fills you. That everything you longed was useless, that the effort hasn’t served for noth...”

When a tear falls, precisely at the point at which Nikita surrenders to the silence, Mélovin drags him towards his mouth taking him by the shoulders. He kisses him while he embraces him; he does it slowly, with affection. Everything is mixed inside of him when it’s about Nikita, everything, because only touch him generates in him the birth of an inexorable need, exploding in a thousand pieces, in a million, for how impossible is to deal with such vehement feelings.

Nikita responds to the kiss with a notorious desperation in each caress against his lips, more expressive than he usually is for the innate shyness of his person and the prejudice about the situation that neither of them has completely overcome. It is Mélovin who releases Nikita with the sole intention of saying something:

“I know that it’s not easy to give everything and that nothing works as you want. It hurts! I know it and I know you know it too!” Mélovin says while he feels his own smile exaggerated in his mouth and his eyes wet moving from a pupil to another of a Nikita enthralled with his gaze; how beautiful is his sadness mixed with the intense feelings that they _seem_ to share.

Mélovin swallows resigned with the agitation of his breathing. He grips Nikita's cheeks with his fingertips, squeezes it, releases it, squeezes it. Nikita has become a mirror, he knows it: in the feeling that he express in his eyes reflects everything that Mélovin himself feels.

“Nikita, don’t force yourself to get well so soon,” Mélovin exclaims. ”I'm still a bit disappointed despite the fact that it's been a month ago, but there's nothing else to do! You didn’t qualify and I ended last with the juries in the final... The press and people can say what they want, and many things have been said, but only we know how hard we try. It didn’t work this time, but effort is what matters. We reach more people! Even in other continents there’s someone listening to us right now, two Ukrainians who are far away and speak a language that they don’t even understand... Don’t you think that’s great? Eurovision is about that, really. It’s true!“ When he discovers it, overwhelmed by deep emotions that he cannot describe, Mélovin kisses Nikita once again, and another, and one more. Nikita looks at him between kisses with an impression that does not stop growing on his face. “Eurovision has as many winners as participants, because absolutely everyone wins in someone's heart. Even who came last! Everybody! So having left your soul up there wasn’t bad, _Niki_. I mean…”

“That's what it matters, right?” Nikita asks “Winning someone's heart…”

“The rest is a show. Or you didn’t see the dislikes in Netta's video? And she was great, but it's true that for all those people one of the other 42 countries won! It's unfair that they mess with her and don’t respect her victory, but somehow I think I can barely understand it.”

Nikita nods.

“One thing is that they don’t like her and another thing is to attack her.” Nikita allow himself to laugh for a moment. He disarms the hug like he, in some way, intends to input some kind of prudence in the situation. Mélovin feels sad about that: it is not the first time that Nikita reacts in that way with him. “Maybe I think too much about everything, if it was a mistake or a good idea.”

"It was a _very_ good idea," Mélovin says moving the hands with emphasis through the air, the hands that seem to serve him no longer when they are not in contact with Nikita. “I understand why you are asking that to yourself, a month is a short time to leave it behind completely, but do not question if open your heart in that way was worth or not, because it was. Don’t reach the final doesn’t mean that what you did was wrong. Everything ends; nothing lasts forever. But…”

Mélovin finds himself thinking in English for a moment, all because of the intensive classes that he is still taking. _Nothing lasts forever_ , he thinks as he turns his eyes to the window where the sunset has gone forever for that day.

No.

He smiles when he thinks in ‘Under the ladder’: actually, there is one thing that lasts forever.

“Fire always must be there, Nikita. If you are an artist, you must keep that fire on stage. You must explode giving everything of yourself; that will never be a mistake and you know it perfectly. People will feel you every time.”

“ _Fire lasts forever_..." Nikita sings in a funny way, like if he were trying to imitate the voice of a Mélovin who feels death approaching by the simple fact of hearing that voice singing his song. He clenches his fists to resist hugging him and pinning him against the window in a passionate move. “I can´t regret that, but maybe… Well, maybe I'm too idealistic…?”

Mélovin does not even need to think about it: yes, he is. Nikita Alekseev is idealistic every time he says ‘I want you to feel my soul’ in an interview and that is one of the most beautiful things about him. It’s easy to say it but difficult to feel it, that’s the truth in these times of superficiality and lies. Mélovin has listened to an infinite amount of Eurovision’s artists talking about souls and hearts; he has believed to no one of them at the level that he believes Nikita every time. Because there is a body language, a determinate gaze, an explicit feeling that comes out through the pores every time he says those things. It is inexplicable; it is only the feeling that he generates each time.

Nikita tells the truth in a world that no longer accepts such audacity.

When Nikita gives a step back, Mélovin advances three and takes one of his hands between his. Looking at him, he discovers that Nikita can’t hide all his feelings, not completely. His feelings are in each place of the room and nothing can be done to hide them. Nothing works, not now.

He does not know why yet, but it is clear now. Nikita can hide no more from him.

“Why do you walk away?” Mélovin asks, because he can no longer contain the question, not with the answer so clear in front of his eyes.

Nikita release his hand. He turns his back at Mélovin; an aura of impenetrable seriousness envelops him. Mélovin tries to hug him from behind, but he holds back.

“How long have we been seeing each other like this, Kostyantyn?”

“You can call me ‘Kostya’ or ‘Mel’ (ok, that nickname doesn’t like me, I admit it) or whatever you want. I…”

Nikita says ‘no’ with the movement of his head.

"It was after you won Vidbir," Nikita continues. In the voice slips, perhaps involuntarily, a thread of sadness “when I came back from Belarus to prepare everything for Eurovision…”

Mélovin is thrilled to see that Nikita remembers everything despite he pretends he does not, that he does not care at all.

Mélovin remembers: they talked for the first time before Vidbir’s final but after the EuroFest’s scandal in Belarus, when so many competitors threatened to withdrawn because of ‘Forever’. Mélovin already appreciated Alekseev’s music, he believed him amazingly talented, so he called him after getting his number thanks to contacts in common, pushed by an irrationality force that begged him to made the contact to give him his support, because only he needed put himself in his place in such a tense situation to feel the whole world crashing with his soul.

He only needed imagining himself in the same position, having to sing in a determinate contest knowing that no other contestant wanted him there! Maybe, his past experience in Vidbir and the disillusion against ‘Time’ allowed the born of that powerful empathy.

Maybe, was what he already felt about Alekseev’s music, the feelings that he had for that music, the musical attraction to that artist.

The attraction itself.

When he called him, Mélovin wished the best to Alekseev. Meanwhile, in his mind, he did not understand why he dared to be so bold with someone so unrelated to him, but he felt that it was what he had to do; both were fighting for Eurovision, after all. He knew, in some way, that Alekseev’s intentions with Belarus and the contest were the best.

“Music isn’t about hate. You are a professional and don’t deserve that treatment, Alekseev.”

“… Do you think so?”

“Of course! Sorry if I’m imprudent, I know that you don’t know me, but…”

“You don’t need to apologize. I appreciate your concern, really. This means… a lot to me”

After that, Alekseev thanked him so much for his unexpected empathy that they agreed to meet at his return from Belarus. Finally, they met in person in Kiev after winning their respective national finals.

Then, the most powerful feeling that Mélovin has felt in his life: the impact of an attraction growing from his chest, trapping him in the sweetest despair; like a cell born from his own heart, buds of flowers hurting his skin while growing, condemning him to the unexpected.

Him.

Mélovin fell attracted to Alekseev from the first second, when he saw him enter in the agreed restaurant with dark glasses, a hoodie covering him and a sweet smile on his lips. Alekseev was like a sun, unbearable to look. He was beyond any taste that anyone could have or not.

Suddenly, Mélovin was trapped between the buds.

Alekseev took off his glasses and looked at him with transparent eyes; they were like two oceans that urged him to sink to the bottom, like if they could extinguish all his internal fire and left him defenseless, trembling, exposed and naked, but full of energy at the same time. He felt his soul naked, as naked as Alekseev's soul on stage every time he sings one of his sad love songs.

“Thank you for that call: you gave me strength in a hard moment.”

Mélovin searched his own voice desperately; he didn’t found it. He smiled to Alekseev, speechless and blind, moved for the unpredictable.

A tension seems had floated in the air during that dinner, but Mélovin, to blinded and incredulous, struggled to concentrate himself on the cordial conversation about Eurovision and what they expected from that experience. Half of an hour was enough to relax: as natural as the growing attraction in Mélovin’s chest, chemistry made its move and the talk had two young singers identified with the other as protagonists.

"I was thinking about using a coffin, you know, being some kind of vampire on stage. I would love that!"

Alekseev smiled. He did not look surprised as other people, but satisfied.

Why?

"I was thinking about _love_."

Mélovin did not understand what he was talking about, but his words got stuck in a different way in his mind. They resounded for days, for weeks, but Mélovin could not say anything about it. He only could felt that tension, that unbearable sensation of looking at Alekseev and being speechless because of him.

Why?!

They kept in touch thanks to texting: ‘I’m so tired!’ became the most common sentence. Both were exhausted, all was hard and beautiful at the same time, and texting each other every single night gave them an unexpected external support. For different countries, but they were in the same situation: they were giving all of themselves to Eurovision. Had the other was a magnificent consolation in the middle of Eurovision’s madness.

The night that they were talking about trivial stuff and the clock told them that was 3 AM, both realized what's already happened: they were friends.

Very good and unexpected friends full of empathy for the other in the same damn situation. All that they needed in those intense days: they were the best support to not give up.

However, when they traveled to Amsterdam during the promotion tour, they met in curious circumstances: they saw themselves alone and disconnected from the universe in a mere minute they shared on the lift of the hotel. Hours and hours of texting, and there they were, finally.

“Alekseev, good to see you!” Mélovin told feeling happy in front of him, evading the tension but overwhelmed by a major joy.

Alekseev’s gaze became a huge wave. Then, the wave became into that tension itself, materialized.

“Yes. I…”

And the miracle happened: Alekseev kissed him suddenly, did it in a soft, sweet but desperately way.

Two seconds, only two; enough.

When they reached the ground floor and the door opened to the reality, Alekseev left without looking back.

Mélovin, impressed by what happened, without reaction, in a blank, did not know what to say or think; he remained right there, in the lift, petrified like a statue and without any capacity for reasoning. What was happening?

Why he kissed him?

Why he allowed Alekseev to kiss him?

They needed to talk, it was imperative. But when? Mélovin decided it when he left the stage after the concert: he would find out his room and go to see him. He would talk to him; he would ask him; he would solve the situation.

He would stop confusing himself with lies about that strange tension without meaning or reason; he would stop thinking about the sensation that, in the form of waves, devastated him every time he saw into Alekseev’s eyes.

Mélovin knocked Alekseev’s room after the concert as he had planned; Alekseev opened the door with his body trembling and his eyes bright. Alekseev allowed him to enter in the room without doubts.

“Kostyantyn, I…” he said when he was closing the door.

Mélovin fiddled with his own fingers: that was the first time he called him for his name.

He was still blank, but he had to do it. Staring at the floor, Mélovin finally could speak:

“I think that we need to talk.”

Alekseev did not answer. Mélovin felt the tension that had dominated Alekseev, the trembles, the anxiety.

“What happened?” Mélovin asked.

“I’m sorry… Maybe I’m too stressed, that’s all.”

Mélovin felt the same stress inside his heart. Eurovision was a stressful event, after all.

But why Alekseev’s gaze seemed so…?

“Why did you kiss me?” Mélovin asked him finally, moved by Alekseev's state of insane vulnerability and the empathy that sunk him in the same damn state.

Alekseev sighed. Forcing a smile, he replied in a tremulous voice:

"I felt I had to do it, that's all.”

Soon, he became Nikita, the person, not the singer he knew.

Mélovin felt how something, an invincible force, an overwhelming energy, something inexplicable pulled the buds that, by that time, had taken over the whole of his heart. It was the gaze that remained so fixed on him, two magnets that pulled him as if they were two black holes that, contrary to coherence, shone with the most blinding light. Thus, he saw his own forehead attached to Nikita's, attached to him as the eyes were.

They breathed on the other; they pushed each other; no one won.

The tension triumphed; naturally, it flourished in the form of a passion, the one that two glued gazes made born.

Soon, the hands lifted. Under both, the earth trembled almost as much as their bodies did. When one hand touched another, a sort of short circuit turned off the reason; the darkness of the room devastated everything else.

The next morning they said nothing, neither of them. The nights in Lisbon either. Every time they texted each other during the Eurovision season either. The tension remained every time they saw each other and it turned into the same kind of passion once more; the need was more powerful than the reason or the sense.

They never talked about what happens and why it happens, about this kind of chemistry that Mélovin felt since the first caress of his gaze against Nikita's. They see each other, they get carried away, they kiss, they touch, they annul each other and they float at the same time. They extract everything from the other and make it their own in a kind of equitable exchange of meaningless joy that means everything, in fact.

What happens does not have a name or a reason; there is no title because it does not seem necessary while they float in the same flow of energy and with the same passion, maybe, or because prejudice, fear, nervousness, whatever.

Until today.

"We've never talked about everything that happened these months," Nikita murmurs without turning to Mélovin.

“Never” Mélovin responds as he feels with what violence his heart beats.

He feels, unfortunately, what Nikita ends up saying:

“Recently, in an interview, they asked me if I was in a relationship. I said no, that I understood that it would be very difficult to be in one in this moment. I'm not going to leave music for anything or anyone and I understand you so much for being in my same situation that I know you will not either. I mean...” Nikita slows down. He is shaking notoriously. “This has no future, Kostyantyn. You’re Mélovin, I’m Alekseev; you’re composing, I’m promoting; you’re with your team, I´m with mine; you have your future, I have mine… Then…”

Mélovin feels how the whole room is distorted around them. He looks at him with more love than what he recognizes to feel: Nikita is wearing a jacket from Arsenal FC, one of his favorite teams, and a black jean that makes his legs look as thin as they actually are. Then, Mélovin looks at his own black hoodie and his own pale, shaking hands; Nikita has become Alekseev, the artist and not the man, and with his back turned to him looks as far away from him as he really is.

Everything that he said is true: there is no future.

Like the sunset in the Ukrainian sky in which it costs so much to rediscover the past, what has happened between them has come to an end.

Mélovin searches to breathe the air that he already lost.

“Nikita…”

The image is further distorted by the tears that invade without clemency his eyelids. However, Mélovin is not allowed to spill them. He clenches more his fists while his frown deforms because of the anguish that undoes his features with brutal punches.

It's over, yes. It’s over, like the sun that day in Odessa, like the light in the Ukrainian sky that will no longer be what it was because they are no longer who they used to be.

But no, it cannot be like this.

Mélovin breathes hard, almost in a gasp, when he sees Nikita’s shaking. It is not only the tears which cause the distortion of the image; it is the obscene shaking of Nikita’s body, that person who wants to be Alekseev to him, someone more distant for him, unattainable, unbreakable, but he cannot.

_Because he does not want to!_

Mélovin smiles: the loose ends scattered throughout the conversation are finally tied to each other in the corresponding order.

"Giving so much of yourself in vain hurts you." Mélovin exclaims with his voice full of conviction. “Not having qualified hurts you because you feel that you did not reach those you wanted to reach; to be with me hurts you because you are also giving too much of you for nothing. That's it: why give so much in a relationship that has no future, which is not even supposed to be a relationship? I mean…! Why give so much in a contest where the juries always end up voting for Sweden? Ha!” Mélovin laughs out loud. He covers his mouth and holds it before continue. “Nikita, I don’t care if this has no future. It's late.”

Nikita turns to him slowly but not before rubbing his face with his hands, perhaps wiping away a tear. Sobs can be heard, the same ones that fill the room that contemplates them stunned by the indisputable beauty of their gazes enlaced.

Mélovin dries one of his eyelids with a finger while smiling.

“Why it’s late?” Nikita asks finally, looking into his eyes.

Mélovin analyzes him: impressed on the surface, frightened at some point, Nikita feels moved for his feelings than anything else. 

 

 **…**  

 

And he is.

Kostyantyn looks at him with a radiant smile in his mouth while he hits his own fingers like he were nothing more than a child. He stretch one finger by holding it with the opposite hand, he flex it, twist it, and repeat the process with the next finger. He do not seem to blink, the clarity of his eyes seems impossible to hide (beauty transcends the tangible), and the mouth is shaking as much as the hands are doing it while playing.

Alekseev has already lost too much. He does not want to let anything go, he does not want to let anyone else go. He wants to be happy, to make his music, to show his soul and to reach his fans’ hearts with all the idealism that he keeps alive in his sensitive heart. He does not want to let go the one who sings, the one who feels.

He wants to fulfill his dream of being an artist, nothing more.

He wants to survive, yes, and love Kostyantyn with his all.

Love him like he already does it, thrilled by his empathy, attracted by his music and enchanted by the soul that shines in his bright eyes. Because that day, that when they met for the first time, the attraction made a pyre inside of him and burned him to the bones. He never had contemplated a light like that.

He needed that light, that's why he insisted in keep in touch and kissed him in the lift, and in the room, and in every met since that specific day.

That light was, _is_ , pure inspiration for him. And inspiration is passion. And passion is love.

And love means art for him. The ‘everything’ of his life.

Is it too late to not make Kostyantyn suffer with his doubts, fears and uncertainty? Is that late?

No: it's late to stop. 

 

 **...**  

 

It is. That’s what Mélovin feels.

"I don't care about anything anymore, Nikita," he says keeping his smile intact. “If it has to be like this, seeing as little as we are seeing, calling us on Skype, whatever. Well, I don't care!" He laughs.

How easy is understanding life when love is like this, vehement and real! He is so happy to be able to feel it in its total amplitude, so obvious in the shaking of his hands and the tears at the edge of his eyelids, in the pain that provokes him to smile, in the need to laugh, to scream, to sing, to explode. He does not care about anything anymore because it's all too obvious.

“I feel something for you.”

“What?”

“Don’t be silly, Nikita: I’m talking about _love_.”

The smile in Nikita's mouth seems involuntary, it is evident that he tries to contain it by covering it, but he cannot. He also cannot open his eyes, because he squeezes his eyelids with all his strength. In the end, he turns once more.

Mélovin have no more doubts: he walks towards him, hugs him from behind, rest his jaw on one shoulder. Nikita does not move from his place, pressing the eyelids with a little more force, hiding his hands in the sleeves of his jacket, trembling, fighting against a fire that he cannot turn off, that it is inside him, that gives form to his whole soul every time he _feels_.

“We can talk a lot on Skype. You can sing to me, I can sing to you, you can tell me that you are tired and I can play the piano for you. And when we meet here, in Ukraine, we can see ourselves like this, like now! We can respect the other’s career and try that it works despite how busy we will be from now on. What do you think?”

Mélovin puts a hand on Nikita's chest. Both sigh at the same time; the heart that Mélovin feels against his skin goes so fast that it seems to try to escape from that body.

Nikita turns his face and caress Mélovin's jaw, he does it with the tip of his nose. Mélovin squeezes his chest with both palms wide open, like if he was trying to contain the heart and to give it the calm that it deserves in order to feel.

"I've already failed in relationships like that," Nikita explains, scrubbing his tight eyelids against Mélovin's cheek.

Mélovin listens to him with all the calm that he can keep in the midst of such emotion. Suddenly, he realizes that Nikita is actually older than him. A few years, four, and he is about ten centimeters less tall, but it's older. He has more experience in some things, maybe, even when he looks younger than him and transmits a kind of sweetness so noticeable in every gaze. He feels that Nikita has his story, his things; much of what Mélovin ignores more than knowing. Perhaps, the suffering he felt in other moment of his life is holding him back today.

Perhaps it is the fear of giving too much of himself again what slows him down to follow with this. 

"I can wait." Mélovin says after a prolonged silence. “You have all the time that you want to decide, really.”

Yes: perhaps, Nikita is the most experienced and that is why he has been terrified by the circumstances. Mélovin is, at least in relationships, in another situation: injected with a vehement and genuine love, he feels that everything is new. This passion takes him by the hand in promising directions. He does not care anymore and has no afraid.

The light that comes from Nikita it blinds the past and the present to him.

He does not know, but every feeling he experiences is reflected detail by detail in the heart that he holds in his hands. Nikita caress Mélovin’s neck with a touch of his lips.

A chill occurs in one and is repeated in the other, or it occurs with astonishing accuracy in both.

“Do you think it's worth it?” Nikita asks.

Mélovin squeezes the jacket that covers Nikita with his always restless fingers. He feels nervous, anxious, overwhelmed and happy, all at the same time in the form of furious beats, shaking and agitation. He also feels curious about what Nikita seems to slide subtly in his speech every time he talks about himself: certain nuances of pessimism that have nothing to do with how shines his smile or with that kind of coldness – it is shyness, he is sure - he expresses when he speaks. It is like there is a very sensitive fiber in the depths of his heart, so sensitive that pessimism needs to work as a shell.

Thinking like that makes Mélovin feels good. Both have, against the body, an exceedingly special person. None of them are conscious of the inner light they have.

That is the most beautiful virtue of both.

"Explain to me why it shouldn't be worth it and I'll see what I can answer," Mélovin says.

Nikita answers calmly despite the tension that remains:

“We are famous out there. We are men, people have prejudices, neither of us has another similar experience…”

Mélovin thinks about joking that he actually does experience, that Nikita does not take him as a little boy, but it's not the time. In fact, Nikita is right, because he had never taken the curiosity towards the same sex to the fact itself. What surprises him is that Nikita would have noticed that. Perhaps, between kisses, in Amsterdam or Lisbon, Mélovin had given himself away. Nikita, now that he thinks about it, had somehow done it too. There it was some awkwardness in both of them, nervousness in the face of novelty, a prejudice, a fear not completely eclipsed by passion...

It had been beautiful. Each time, yes, it had been beautiful despite of those human imperfections.

"You're not going to convince me with anything, _Niki_. I didn’t plan this with you; I was just another fan who wanted to give his support to someone respected by him, who seemed too talented to be treated in that way in a national final. I thought it was good to support you with my previous experience in Vidbir. Be with you and getting to this point where I cannot conceive ending up with you wasn’t something I could calculate. Now I'm lost: I just want you with me since today.”

“I can’t.”

“Me neither,“ both laugh, “but if you give me a chance I can always be with you, like, well, I can send you photos of me so you can think of me. Can I?”

Nikita rub his locked eyes against his neck, still laughing; Mélovin feels how a thread of electricity travels through his body. It is true that the smile he has in his mouth, more radiant than what he can imagine, hurts. He is so happy that it hurts.

If Nikita rejects him, the fall will be like collapsing in the darkest emptiness without any parachute.

"Always... I'll be thinking in you, Kostyantyn," Nikita says, and Mélovin's heart smiles as much as his mouth does. "You do not need to send those photos."

"Oh, of course I need it. In case that you see Elina on some tour and give her flowers again!"

Nikita releases a louder laugh. Then, naturally and after minutes in the same position, he turns to him without letting go of the hug that Mélovin gives him.

Mélovin receives him sunk in a deep happiness. Nikita smiles, but is somewhat concerned; at least that is what he transparent in his gaze. Finally, no: he closes his eyes and sinks into Mélovin's shoulder without having to go back further. 

 

 **...**  

 

It is all that he has forbidden to desire: giving himself the chance of a real feeling after years of evading the miracle that for him means love. Because love has always been the answer, it was every time he found in his love for music the way to be happy in the fullest way.

Now he could found that love in a place that he could not imagine in the past, in the arms of another artist; in a person who, being in the same situation than him, can understand every single feel.

It is not unreasonable to think that this it can works, discovers Alekseev by enlarging the smile against Kostyantyn’s chest with the sole intention of enjoying his passionate heartbeat.

This can works, and feeling it so real gives him enough confidence to face everything else. Fears, doubts.

Everything. 

 

**...**

 

Mélovin, for a moment, thinks that he has Citrus and not Nikita in his arms. That's how sweet it feels to embrace him.

He raises his eyes and realizes that, from where they are, a rectangular mirror with a minimalist frame focuses them. Mélovin sees how Nikita embraces him, how hard he does it, and happiness is such that he struggles not to burst into a thousand pieces.

“Then?”

“What?”

“We tried? I can go to your house when I'm in Kiev and you can come to mine when you're in Odessa. We can see how to deal with...”

“Ok.”

Mélovin laughs like a child that all he wants in life is to scream because of the best gift in Christmas. He squeezes Nikita showing his teeth to him, with his mouth too open and sore. Without realizing it, he begins to make diffuse and hasty plans, one after the other, from embrace to each other in his bed until introducing him to Citrus and rest the three together; from making him listen to his favorite Lady Gaga’ songs until playing his new songs on the piano for him; from kissing him until his lips burn until asking him to sing at the most supreme point of the most intimate enjoyment.

Love, music and desire are mixed in a salad made with madness that he does not know how to endure, that reduces him to nothing, that it fixes his eyes on the mirror and make him fall too much in love with that concept of two that they constitute.

That fills him with happiness, one greater than any prize he could have received.

When he wants to realize all what is happening, Nikita is clinging to him like if there was glue between them. He trembles in Mélovin's arms; he does it just like when he sings on stage, while he warms Mélovin's hoodie with his breath and squeezes his eyelids too much. Soon, however, Nikita leans back, releases Mélovin, puts a hand on his chest and nods with a smile.

With that gesture, he tries to say 'thank you'.

Mélovin remains in front of him fiddling with his fingers and wrapped in surprise. It is too good to be true.

He needs to do something, _whatever_ , to believe that it is.

Mélovin look at the eyes that look at him. He is not aware of how radiant his own smile is, because he feels nothing or knows more than the light that comes from Nikita. On the other side, the impression is the same.

Nikita holds his hands in a soft way and warms them between his. Mélovin feels that not even feeling touched allows him to believe. And what an absurdity it is! Of course he is there, with him. After so many months of work in their respective careers, heading to a contest where the juries had turned their backs to both, Nikita is there with him and future seems to exist.

This, maybe, was meant to be broken. But it doesn’t.

He feels like a child, the one who really is the younger of the two. Even when nothing is sweeter than Nikita, is him, not Mélovin, who attracts him and kisses him this time. Afterwards, in the reflect that the mirror exposes there is no image, in the room there is no conversation; when two bodies join in the shadows that allows them to scream what they feel without fears, it is like the fire burned itself for the intensity of its nature and fades in the depths of the most sublime oceans.

Nothing remains, nothing exists, only two foreheads glued in the dark, two agitated breaths crashing with the other and two pairs of eyes, above all, glimpsing in the stillness of this sky which is a bed the real beauty and the real meaning of what they feel; of this happiness which is more, because is love and is art in its purest form.

Mélovin caresses the cheek that he does not see in Nikita’s face, because the eyes of this one seem sunk in his. In the dark, Mélovin only sees how the pupils oscillate to one side, to the other, to the other, while he is convinced by the caress that these eyes he sees belong to someone. They do, and the irregular breathing that he feels crashing with his face reminds him the rest.

“I have to go, Kostyantyn.”

However, the arms do not let go of his waist. Mélovin laughs at the absurdity of the dialogue.

“How cute you are, _Niki_ : you keep thinking that when you leave, you leave.”

“Isn’t that what I do?”

“You never leave, tiny boy.”

The laughs mix with the shared agitation. The hand that touches the face ventures to the back where, a month ago, there were roses growing in a ‘forever´ metaphor of love. Apparently, or that feels Mélovin judging by the soft laugh that comes off of who looks at him, Nikita has understood the meaning of the caress, the one that Mélovin paints with the fingers lowering and raising in an incomplete rubbing against the skin.

Give everything will always be good, discovers both at once. Even if the results are fair or not.

Even if is love the real prize.

In the end, all it is about the feelings. Venture inside a heart; raze the pain with a sweep. The rest comes and goes, becomes and deforms, is poisoned in the wrong and is empowered in what matters; the elemental thing of life, for an artist, is about feeling and nothing more.

Only love has the ability, the magic, the nature to lasts forever in all.

* * *

  **f i n**

**Author's Note:**

> If you read this whole (not beautiful) mess, THANK YOU! ♥
> 
> I'd like to dedicate this story to all those beautiful people on TUMBLR that made this possible: I fell in love with Melekseev because all of you! Thanks! Also, thanks to my dear friend J.: you will never read this (porque me da vergüenza XD), but I love you with all my heart.
> 
> If this is too overdramatic or something… Forgive me. I gave my best, I swear. I blame Nikita and Дельфины for all this: I tried to put in this story all what that song inspire in me. 
> 
> Hope you like it after all the mistakes! 
> 
> Thanks for reading, truly. :’)


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